Tag: WordPress plugins

Bylines is a modern rewrite of Co-Authors Plus that I started last April. It hasn't been anywhere near my primary focus for quite a while, so I finally called a spade a spade and started looking for a new owner. Fortunately, it's a perfect fit for the developers behind PublishPress — I'm glad my customers ended up in good hands.

Based on the initial API request, there are 49,749 total WordPress.org plugins.

Of the entire data set, only 18,002 plugins have 200 or greater active installs. The remaining 31,747 plugins represent an inconsequential number of active installs compared to the total.

The 18,002 plugins represent 182,296,500 total active installs. A WordPress install can have multiple active plugins, so this total isn't unique WordPress installs. Also, we can ignore the remaining ~32k plugins because they would only represent 3,174,700 additional active installs if each plugin had 100 active installs.

Of the total active installs, 168,623,000 (92.5%) are represented by 3,440 plugins with >=5000 active installs. For that matter, 159,720,000 (87.6%) are represented by 2101 plugins with >=10000 active installs.

It'd be interesting to know what percentage of WordPress installs have a plugin not tracked in the WordPress.org plugin directory (e.g. premium or custom).

Some incomplete ideas I've been noodling on that I want to make public.

Ultimately, the goal is: the vast majority of WordPress users are excited and should be able to use Gutenberg on day one. Fundamentally, this breaks down into two objectives:

Make the end-user experience is so good that WordPress users actively want to switch to it. We need to continue user testing as we have been, and iterate based on real user feedback. We also need to market Gutenberg — communicate what users should expect and get them appropriately excited.

Mitigate WordPress plugin and theme incompatibilities, to minimize conflicts that would cause WordPress to fall back to the classic editor. Success is defined by the majority of WordPress users being able to use Gutenberg on day one. If too many can't use Gutenberg because of conflicts, then we've failed at launch.

I've been brainstorming some strategies for the latter, which really is two parts: identification and mitigation.

First, we need to identify the true extent of the problem: what plugins and themes are incompatible with Gutenberg, and in what ways are each incompatible? Some automated ways we can produce this data includes:

Manual/automated analysis of action and filters usage, etc.

Activate each in an isolated environment and take before/after screenshots of the editor screen.

But, I'm thinking good ol' fashioned crowd-sourcing might be most effective. What if WordPress users had an easy way to report whether a given plugin or theme was compatible with Gutenberg? We could collect this data in aggregate to get a good sense of what types of incompatibilities we should expect, and where we should focus our efforts.

Once we've identified the plugin and theme conflicts, we'll need to mitigate them. Doing so will require excellent documentation, so authors more easily understand the changes they'll need to make, and deputizing other developers to help with the outreach process.

On WordPress projects where the entire application is defined by the theme, it can be common to submodule or directly commit WordPress plugins to a directory like theme-name/lib. However, in doing so, you lose out on WordPress’ built-in update tracking.

It would be cool to have a utility plugin that loads theme-specific plugins into the Manage Plugins view and WordPress update check.